Africa Is a Country

Fascism and Aesthetics

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Fascism and Aesthetics

By
Sean Jacobs

Jeremy Cronin is my favorite Communist. Astute, intellectual and a poet. Cronin is a former political prisoner and now ANC member of Parliament in South Africa. “Even the Dead” is still my favorite poem. I recently chanced upon a 2009 interview he did with the academic Andrew van der Vlies (featured on this blog here) in Contemporary Literature. (You need a subscription or access to an academic database to read it.) Much of it is about Cronin’s poetry (more for diehard literature types), but in-between the interview contain some great insights about political life and political art in South Africa now. I’m going to cut and paste a few of them here.

For starters:

… [I]n the present South African situation, it is particularly important to reconsider many things in the light of the new reality. The ANC-led movement is no longer a persecuted formation; it is in power, at least in political power. Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that fascism systematically introduces aesthetics into political life. It marshals art into what he describes as “the production of ritual values.” He suggests that we should respond to fascism’s rendering politics aesthetic by politicizing aesthetics. I certainly do not think that we are on the brink of fascism, not even remotely. But the dangers of the aesthetic, including poetry, now being pressed into the service of a lulling complacency, a ritualistic sentimentalism that loses the zip and edge of the collective self-emancipatory struggles of the previous period, are very real. The aesthetic runs the danger of becoming anesthetic …

Source.

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